1. Technical Field Of The Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer-aided design (CAD) systems and, more particularly, to CAD systems and methods for designing visual displays.
2. Description Of The Prior Art
Electronic displays are used to convey information for a number of military, industrial, avionics, and consumer products. Traditional electronic displays use cathode ray tubes (CRTs). In comparison to the traditional cathode ray tube display, flat panel displays, such as liquid crystal displays (LCD's), provide compact, lightweight, relatively low-power, display units. Various other types of flat panel displays based on cold cathode or field emitters, vacuum florescent, and electroluminescent technologies are also used.
The various technologies used in flat panel display systems have implicit trade-off between cost and ease of manufacture. For a matrixed type of display such as an active matrix LCD (AMLCD), good gray scale resolution and good spatial resolution are obtained with increased manufacturing costs. Gray scale resolution and spatial resolution can be compromised and error diffusion techniques can be used to reduce the visibility of stair step artifacts which are a result of gray scale quantization. These various tradeoffs are often difficult to objectively evaluate and are often limited by the visual system of the evaluator. The ultimate criterion for judging the quality of a display resides in the human visual system, so that technology tradeoffs need to be evaluated in terms of the impact of tradeoffs on a system with a human viewer as an essential system component.
The traditional approach to design of a display system is often an iterative, cyclical process which requires an investment of a great deal of time and resources to cycle several times through the various design steps. For development of a product such as an electronic display, the design steps include: initial design, simulation of the design, construction of engineering prototypes, development of pilot production models, and assembly of final production models. Particularly in development of a product such as a display system, performance data is often developed at a later stage of the design process, which often may require that an earlier design step must be essentially, or at least in part, repeated. The traditional design cycle takes additional time to empirically go through the various design choices, particularly when the various design choices can only be verified with a working model.
Consequently, a need exists for a design tool, or simulator, which includes all of the various system elements for a display system and which allows a display system evaluator to be able to separately modify each element of the system. A need also exists for a display system design tool which provides objective performance measurements for comparison of a modified system design to a standard system design.